Helping the feds: USDA Wildlife Services benefits from increased state funding

Here Jeff Gearino describes how pleased Wildlife Services is to get this big boost from the state. Now they can use the federal money for other predator control projects.

Helping the feds: USDA Wildlife Services benefits from increased state funding. By Jeff Gearino. Jackson Hole Star Tribune.

It’s not a business for the squeamish. Tools of the trade include planes and helicopters for aerial gunning of coyotes, rifles, shotguns, and a variety of snares, traps and poisons. Birds constitute the overwhelming majority of animals exterminated, with about 2.3 million grain-devouring starlings killed at a national level last year.

I’m not concerned about the non-native starlings, but somehow I don’t think this is more than a sidelight.

Local [Wyoming] predator boards get boost

In this article Jeff Gearino explains how the increasing funding will allow local predator boards to expand killing to more species — skunks, starlings, and ravens. Somehow these species are menacing soda ash production in Wyoming and are a threat to the Jackson Hole airport.

There are already killing a lot of coyotes from the air. Judging from this practice and buildup.

I can just see how they might be able to wipe out most of the wolves and grizzly bears even if they get just a short window by a judge.

 Local predator boards get boost. By Jeff Geario. Casper Star Tribune

Predator control for Wyoming wildlife stirs debate

Here is another story on the big jump in Wyoming predator control money. This one focuses on predators killing “good wildlife.” Ironically, this story comes just a week or so after it was revealed that Wyoming Game and Fish officials think there are too many “good wildlife” (elk, deer, and pronghorn) at the present, and needed to be reduced.

Predator control for wildlife stirs debate. By Whitney Royster. Casper Star Tribune.

Kill or be killed (about Wyoming predator control)

Reporter Jeff Gearino and others have written a series of articles in the last few days about the $6-million the Wyoming legislature just put into state-funded predator control. That is a sudden infusion of big money, and I wonder what it’s really about? This is money on top of that appropriated by Congress for the predator control federal agency, Wildlife Services. I haven’t seen any reports on a large buildup of coyotes, even though that’s what most of the talk in the article is about.

Somehow I’m suspicious that the big dollar increase has something to do with the just delisted grizzly bear, and maybe, the soon to be delisted wolf.

Here is the first article “Kill or be Killed,” which begins with two foreign workers riding their “magnificent steeds, trailed by their equally magnificent Great Pyrenees sheepdogs” as they get instructions from their padrone to go out and kill a whole bunch of coyotes.